Rich
Biezynski’s chickens
at Northwind Farm may have the best view in Dutchess County. From not quite
the highest spot on Kerley Corners Road above Tivoli, the land continues to
climb towards the west, where the Catskills turn dark blue in the fading
light each evening. It’s a view I’d love to have from my living room, but
Rich would prefer that it remain solely for his chickens, his pheasants, his
ducks, his turkeys, his pigs, and his recently acquired British White and
Angus cross-bred beef cattle.

Rich
is one of the small
livestock farmers I interviewed on my ramble through local farmland here in
the mid- Hudson Valley, where small livestock farming has a tradition that
predates Chancellor Robert Livingston’s shipment in 1802 of four Merino sheep
from Spain to his Clermont estate in Columbia County so he would no longer
need to import fine cloth from Europe. The resulting flock also built up the
soil depleted by his tenant farmers’ crops and supplied meat for his family.
In those days—before cans, flash frozen foods, and refrigeration—the only
meat and dairy products available were the ones grown nearby. Over the past
few years, as I’ve begun to eat more naturally grown, locally produced meat,
milk, and cheese (not unlike those the Livingstons produced themselves), I’ve
discovered that although the Livingston family had fewer choices for dinner,
their roasts probably tasted better than the meat I find in the supermarket
today.

Several
miles south of
Northwind, and just one-half mile from the Rhinebeck village store that sells
imported cigars, Bernhard and Bentley Scholldorf, father and son, milk 45
Holstein cows twice a day, 365 days a year, on the last dairy farm in
Rhinebeck. Their cows, like Northwind’s chickens, also have a view of the
Catskills. Over the kitchen table in the brief lull after the morning chores,
but before the cows are brought in for the afternoon milking, Bernhard and
Bentley Scholldorf describe just how much things have changed in the past 50
years. Bernhard, almost 78, has a twinkle in his blue eyes and one of the
most wonderful smiles I’ve ever seen. He sighs and shakes his head as he
tells me—in a German accent that hasn’t faded—that there were 287 dairy farms
in Dutchess County when he came here in 1952 to work on his Uncle Karl’s
farm. By 2002 there were just 34 dairy farms left in Dutchess County, down
from 55 in 1997. (The picture was slightly better in Columbia County, where
the fall was from 87 dairy farms in 1997 to 54 in 2002. In Ulster County, the
number of dairy farms has declined to a mere 15.)

The
Scholldorf land is a
developer’s dream—close to the village, a view of the mountains, just waiting
to be divided into parcels for homes with large picture windows for the
sunset. The prices for properties like this and even smaller, less
spectacular ones, increased by over 65% between 2000 and 2004. While the real
estate market may have flattened recently, there is no indication that this
trend will reverse.

The
Hudson Valley is
blessed with some of the richest agricultural soil in the country. Almost
everyone wants the open space, the cleaner air and the safe, tasty food that
its soil can produce, yet we become dangerously annoyed when stuck behind
that snail-slow tractor the farmer drives to work. It’s easy to take for
granted our area’s small farms until we realize the role of the farmer and
his or her animals as guardians of the land that lifts our spirits, cleans
our air, and grows our food. When the small livestock farmer turns his
animals out to pasture, he uses the grass, grown by the sun, to feed his
animals, and they, in turn, fertilize the soil as they go. Yet this
infinitely renewable energy cycle is in danger of being parceled away.
"The fields that were corn and hay now have houses," says
Northwind’s Rich Biezynski. "They can never be farmed again." All
the small livestock farmers I interviewed are confronting rising costs,
increased residential development pressure, and the impact of globalization.

Local
Farms, Local
Markets

Northwind’s
Rich
Biezynski, who has been farming for 25 years, says his love of animals and
nature goes back to his boyhood. "I made a small pond in the backyard
for the toads, frogs and fish I’d collected. One day my father sprayed the
two apple trees on the edge of the property. When he came in from the
spraying he was covered with white powder. The next morning, the fish and
frogs were dead. I was scared. If it killed the animals, what would it do to
my father?" Many of those pesticides were taken off the market when it
was later discovered that they posed an unacceptable risk to the humans
applying them or consuming the products they were used to protect. Biezynski
is committed to raising his poultry without hormones or routine antibiotics.

Rich
sells his poultry,
his beef, and his pork at the farm. His products are also carried by Adams
Fairacre Farms, which has a commitment to local produce, and by health food
stores that have a commitment to humanely raised, natural meat. The local
supermarket chains are wary. They prefer to deal with large suppliers who can
deliver the same number of chickens—most likely from Maryland or Georgia—all
the same size, every week of the year. Every fall I drive up to Northwind to
pick up a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving. The number of miles from his
barnyard to my dinner table? 11.

In
Rhinebeck, Bentley and
Bernhard Scholldorf are well aware that their land would yield more in homes
that it has ever yielded in milk. We sat around the kitchen table while they
finished their lunch of leftover pizza (who has time to cook?), the counters
piled with Hoard’s Dairyman and various market reports, as Bernhard fiddled
with his suspenders and described how he fought his way through debt, bad
weather, and low milk prices to stay on this farm and raise his children. To
the uninitiated listener, his current challenges sound like a scourge of
biblical plagues. The rising cost of fuel makes farming increasingly
expensive. The livestock farmer who grows his own corn and hay to feed his
animals pays more for the gas in his tractor; the dairyman pays more for the
energy that cools the milk in his holding tank and for the transportation of
that milk to the processor. The price of feed has skyrocketed. In September
2006, corn cost approx $2.50 a bushel. Just 6 months later, the price had
climbed to over $4/bushel. The increased cost of feed is a reflection of both
the increase in energy costs required to grow the corn and increasing price
pressure as corn begins to move out of the food chain and into ethanol fuel.
Add to the higher price of feed the higher feed delivery charges to cover the
rising cost of gasoline. And, the prices of farm supplies, like everything
else, creep ever upward. Water tubs, fencing, gates, vaccines, even ordinary
shovels and wheelbarrows, have all become more expensive.

A
large manufacturer can
respond to increasing costs by moving his operations abroad where his labor
and supplies are cheaper. Although I can buy a pear from Argentina at my
local grocery store, the Scholldorfs cannot move their cows to Argentina to
take advantage of lower costs. They want to keep their dairy small and family
operated. In the Midwest and California, small and moderate sized dairies
have consolidated into large confinement dairy operations with economies of
scale; the cows remain in their stanchions 24 hours a day and are given
bovine growth hormone to increase milk production.

The
Low Price of Milk (to
farmers)

The
Scholldorfs, like
other dairy farmers, are at the mercy of a complicated pricing mechanism that
aims to keep milk production high while milk prices remain low. In 2004 the
price of milk paid to the farmer fell by 38 cents a gallon as the price we
paid at the store crept upward. Sam Simon, founder of Hudson Valley Fresh,
says that even with price supports, the farm price of milk (the price paid to
the farmer) comes in under production costs. "The banks own the
farms," he says.

Simon,
a retired
orthopedic surgeon who grew up on a farm and now runs his own dairy farm in
Pleasant Valley, is determined to give our small local dairies an option. In
2005 he launched Hudson Valley Fresh, a non-profit milk label that guarantees
a higher quality, fresher, cleaner bottle of milk. Simon believes that the
consumer will pay more for a better product— the seven farms in Dutchess and
Columbia counties that market their milk through Hudson Valley Fresh must
meet standards considerably higher than those set by the state. Simon uses
the somatic cell count as the ultimate measure of clean, fresh, milk. This
test measures the number of white blood cells in the milk. White blood cell
count typically increases when an animal (or person) is ill or under stress.
In the dairy business, it can result in milk that is off flavor. Hudson
Valley Fresh milk must have a somatic cell count of under 200,000/milliliter,
considerably less than the federal limit of 750,000/milliliter. Hudson Valley
Fresh milk is processed in its own tank at Ronnybrook Dairy in Pine Plains
and delivered to the grocery store in just 36 hours from cow to shelf. Hudson
Valley Fresh milk travels an average of just 35 miles from the cow to the
store.

Pork,
Beef &
Christmas Trees

Hudson
Valley Fresh came
on the scene too late for Tom Hahn. Tom ended his dairy operation in Salt
Point in 1988 when milk prices fell too low to make it worth his while. He
moved into beef and pork, hay, corn, pumpkins and Christmas trees. From his
farm stand at the end of the driveway, I walked up to his weathered wooden
barn complex where I was greeted by a group of boisterous Yorkshire cross
pigs, curious and hopeful that I might be there to feed them. They were
completely oblivious to their view of rolling pasture set against a dark
green tree line. Cows, including Heidi—an 18-year-old Black Angus as large as
a truck—relaxed under the barn overhang. Heidi greets the some 2,000 school
children that come every October for farm tours during Tom’s Fall Festival
weekends.

Tom
raises about 40 pigs
and 60 beef cattle each year. He sells his meat exclusively at the farm.
Although he’s had requests from restaurants, Tom prefers to have many small
customers rather than a few large ones. Some order a whole side of beef or
pork while others come by for just a few steaks or pork chops. Not only do
his customers avoid the additional price mark-up his meat would face at the
super market, they see where the meat is raised, who raises it, and how well
the animals are cared for. Tom Hahn’s animals never set foot in a crowded
industrial feedlot, hock deep in manure. I bought two large pork chops and a
rib eye steak. The meat traveled just 15 miles from Tom’s farm to my kitchen.

Not
far from the
Scholldorf dairy, Pat McLaughlin’s family raises beef cattle on the pasture
once grazed by her father Dan’s dairy herd. Pat talks passionately about the
land and the soil itself. "My hands are in the dirt. I’ve tasted it,
smelled it, felt it, I’m invested in the land." She remembers haying
with his father at Wilderstein while Miss Daisy Suckley, FDR’s confidante,
looked on as the bales slid off the wagon parked on the steep hillside. And
she remembers working the field where Williams Lumber now stands, and how
they used to cool off in the shade of a breathtaking grove of birches that
stood close to the road in what is now the parking lot.

Lambing
Time

On
a cold, clear February
Sunday I drove out to Wil-Hi farm just north of Red Hook. The large barn cat
that met me at the car followed me as I went in search of Heidi and Chuck. It
was lambing time, so they were busier than usual. We checked out the 4 ewes
with their new lambs in the red clapboard barn. The first three ewes and
lambs were doing well and would soon rejoin the main flock, but the little
black Suffolk with his mother in the corner pen was having a tougher time
getting started. He wore a tiny black coat and there was a heat lamp rigged
up for extra warmth. The lamb was still too weak to nurse reliably, so Chuck
and Heidi were milking out the mother and bottle feeding the little one until
he grew strong enough to nurse on his own.

The
Simmons have about 80
sheep—Rambouillets and Suffolks—on a farm totaling 34 acres. The sheep, plus
the two goats used to raise orphaned sheep, look out on gently rolling hills
covered with stately rows of apple trees. This operation is a labor of love,
as Chuck and Heidi both have other, full-time jobs. The day begins at 5:30
with farm chores. They stagger their lunch breaks at work so that they can
each return to the farm at mid-day to check the sheep. Chuck and Heidi do not
have the time to process and market their lamb. They rely on their
location—the flock is visible from Rt. 9—to sell the sheep to families from
Greece, Italy, and Portugal who, as Chuck says, "like lamb the old
fashioned way."

Although
most of us are
certainly not willing or able to butcher our own meat, Chuck has a point. Do
you know where your meat comes from? Can you see beyond the plastic and
Styrofoam package on the supermarket shelf to the farm where it was raised?
To increasing numbers of consumers, this matters. Almost 50% of the lamb sold
in supermarkets is from Australia and New Zealand. Heidi wonders "why
would people want to buy meat from the other side of the world, where you
don’t know how it was cared for or even how long ago it was butchered?"

Nearly
all the meat we
buy at the supermarket is from animals that spent their last months in huge
crowded feedlots, without grass, where they were fattened on a corn based
ration while they awaited slaughter. American consumers have grown used to
the taste of corn fed meat. Yet research has shown that meat from grass fed
animals contains less saturated fat and more omega-3 fatty acids than corn
raised meat. In addition, large amounts of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and
folic acid in the green grass make their way into the meat of the animals
that eat it.

On
a high windy ridge in
Greene County, Mike Kelley’s Icelandic sheep have a spectacular view of Black
Dome peak from Dancing Lamb Farm and Icelandic Sheep Dairy. Mike milks her
sheep and makes an aged Catskill Mountain Tomme cheese. She’s a committed
grass farmer who practices rotational grazing. In her small, white walled
cheese room that looks out onto the Catskills, Mike explains that grass-fed
sheep produce a richer, more flavorful milk. "I use my own milk and I
know how clean it is and that it doesn’t have any antibiotics. It’s important
that the milk for the cheese be fresh." She makes her cheese every other
day. "Sheep milk just wants to be cheese," she says. "It’s
more stable than goat milk, and it’s richer than both cow and goat
milk."

Her
Icelandic sheep are
on the small side (they’re not nearly as big as Chuck and Heidi’s Rambouillets)
and come in shades of brown, black, gray, and white. Mike says Icelandics
don’t produce as much milk as the East Friesans and Lacaunes, which have been
bred, like Holstein cows, to produce rivers of milk. She chose Icelandics
because they do well on grass, they lamb on pasture, and they regularly
produce twins and triplets. An ancient, hardy breed, unimproved by centuries
of specialty breeding, they produce rich milk, good meat, and beautiful fiber
for spinning and knitting. Icelandic grass-fed lamb is a milder,
finer-grained lamb that comes in smaller cuts than the chunky Australian and
New Zealand lamb found at the store. This year Mike is adding pigs (to better
utilize the whey left over from cheese making), pastured poultry, and
free-range laying chickens to increase diversity. Forty minutes after I left
the farm with Dancing Lamb cheese and meat on the passenger seat beside me, I
opened my refrigerator and placed them beside the kale and the orange juice,
both of which had no doubt traveled a much longer distance.

Like
the other small
livestock farmers I interviewed, Mike has had to be creative in finding
markets for her products. She sells her cheese at the Catskill Point Farmers’
Market, on-line through her website, at Heather Ridge Farm in Preston Hollow,
and at the farm by appointment. Her lamb is available at the Farmers’ Market
and at Honest Weight Co-op in Albany. She’ll be at the Troy Winter Farmer’s
Market this fall.

Mike
cares for over a
hundred sheep, milks twice a day during the summer and makes cheese, with
only the help of her husband, Ron, and an occasional intern. Then she goes to
her "day job" as a part time physician’s assistant. The sheep are
beautiful, but I am exhausted just listening to her list of chores. When I
ask her why she farms, she laughs, "I’m crazy, but it’s the only thing
I’ve ever done that makes me feel like I’m improving my part of the planet.
And I love the animals. They do much of the work of pasture management. They
eat the grass, keep the land open and fertilize it as they go. I could still
improve the land without the animals, but not nearly as well." She
believes that small livestock farmers, because they have fewer animals, spend
more time with each individual animal and are therefore likely to take better
care of their animals than large agri-business meat farms. The animals don’t
need routine antibiotics because they aren’t overcrowded. And they aren’t
given growth hormones because the farmer puts quality above quantity.

The
sheep, the cow, the
pig, and the chicken raised on our small, local farms not only taste good,
they have also helped to enrich our soil and protect our open spaces. And,
most likely, they have led a very decent life. If we lose our local small
livestock growers, we lose a tradition that continues to give us the option
of purchasing delicious, healthy food raised nearby by men and women deeply
committed to caring for the soil and their animals. Finding this food takes a
bit more time than one stop shopping at the supermarket, but it’s well worth
the effort. When we buy local, we become the farmer’s partner in protecting
the earth. Visit your local farm and see for yourself.